Butterworth’s good-natured buffoonery and hyperbole work far better than Butterworth-as-Griffin adding repartee to Hazardous...
Butterworth drops his W.E.B. Griffin nom de plume and shifts from spy/soldier/police derring-do to produce a romantic adventure novel fueled by sly, sometimes arch, humor.
Two narrative threads follow Philip Wallingford Williams III, a rich boy expelled from more than one of the right prep schools. In the first, World War II has just ended, and young Phil decides to forge a birth certificate and join the military. He takes "to the Army like a duckling to water," and Butterworth’s tale becomes a Forrest Gump–like story of right place, right time. Names are dropped—Schwarzkopf, Colby—as Phil joins a military intelligence detachment in occupied Berlin. Soon he's working for the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation, a CIA cover that unearths Russian spies like beautiful Legs Benidik. Berlin characters include ring-knockers, ticket punchers, hard-drinkers, and refugees from mental institutions and Fort Leavenworth prison. A lusty weekend results in Phil’s shotgun wedding to Brunhilde Williams, a Viennese ballerina who later earns the sobriquet "AA," the Angry Austrian. Marriage to a foreigner costs Phil his security clearance, so out of the Army he goes, to settle in Muddiebay, Mississippi, and begin a career as a novelist. Surreptitious notes he made of military officers’ sexual peccadilloes become the foundations for bestsellers. The second thread, circa 1975, follows successful novelist Phil among Muddiebay’s oversexed dilettantes, trust fund babies, and nouveau riche pretenders as they organize a pheasant-hunting trip to Scotland, a beard for adulterous liaisons and aristocratic hobnobbing. Throughout there’s bed-hopping; arch, referential, smug, sometimes supercilious humor; some bits of outright funny stuff; "Expletive Deleted!!" employed by the dozens; a quirky homage to the late Tom Clancy; and some lamentable anachronisms—but Phil finds true love.
Butterworth’s good-natured buffoonery and hyperbole work far better than Butterworth-as-Griffin adding repartee to Hazardous Duty (2014).Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17623-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual...
Stephenson’s prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia.
In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse’s grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe’s stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who’s developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe’s old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone’s listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese.
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual vainglorious style; still, there’s surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps.Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97346-4
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
IN THE NEWS
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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